You know you're an artist when...

[ornoth]

So the strangest thing just happened to me in Graphic Design class. We were showing our preliminary designs for a small poster with an abstract design composed entirely of letters, numbers, and symbols from a typeface that we had chosen.

The typeface I had selected was Frutiger, which was designed specifically for — and made famous by — the Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris in the early '70s.

My design featured a series of letters whose forms made a kind of sophisticated pipeline around three sides of the poster, and the upper right quarter of an immense grey 'X', and a series of numbers that went along the edge of the 'X' in perspective. I was trying to be smart by creating a cognitive dissonance with things overlapping the "wrong" way in perspective and a bunch of other stuff that doesn't really matter. The result looked reasonably good, but I felt it needed some tweaking to achieve my goals.

Well, imagine my surprise when I tacked the thing up and the first comment out of the instructor's mouth was "This just screams 'airport'", and it totally did! My nice black pipeline looked just like a stylized map of a circuit road, and the big grey 'X' couldn't have looked more like a runway than if I'd tried, and came complete with big runway numbers along it!It really did scream "airport".

Knowing that Frutiger was designed specifically for an airport, the poster couldn't have possibly been a more perfect interpretation of its original context! And the thing that absolutely floors me is that it was so completely NOT what I was thinking when I laid the thing out!

Too bizarre. Just too bizarre.